Notes & Quotes: Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook

Notes & Quotes are where I post links to and information about the resources used in my book Corporate Empathy.

Sheryl Sandberg will likely be one of the most influential people of the technology and digital age. Her views are spot on and her goals for the equality of men as well as women are great.

Prior to joining Facebook as COO in 2008 Sandberg was a research assistant at the World Bank where she worked on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness followed by serving as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury. In 2001 she joined Google as Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations as well as being involved in launching Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org. Sandberg also serves on the board of directors for The Walt Disney Company in addition to being a married mother of two.

MAKERS.com is a dynamic digital platform produced by filmmakers Dyllan McGee, Betsy West, and Peter Kunhardt, developed by AOL, showcasing hundreds of compelling stories from women of today and tomorrow. This historic video initiative features exclusive access to trailblazing women – both known and unknown. In Sandberg’s introduction video she states at 01:02 the following about how technology is changing people’s lives. She follows at 02:33 with a statement about her beliefs in what Facebook does as a company.

At the treasury we would meet with all kinds of people, you get to meet with all kinds of people in the government and it seemed like what was actually changing people’s lives the most to me was technology; and so I wanted to work there and I kind of had to get over the fact that these were for profit companies, but I believe they were for profit companies that were really changing who we were as people and how we interacted, and so I went to Google.

I really believe in what Facebook does. You know technology was going to change all our lives and it has. But technology to power us as people is really the social networking movement. People donate organs, people find their birth mothers, people find friends in ways they never would and people even start movements

Sheryl Sandberg in her 2011 Barnard College Commencement at 12:58 describes a greatly improved world.

A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.

The statement below was made by Sandberg with Mark Zuckerberg in a 2011 interview with Charlie Rose. The conversation on education, engineers, and immigration begins at 14:55.

We give a huge percentage of the spots in our engineering undergrad and grad program to people from other countries, and then we kick them out. It’s like a company. We’d have Facebook training, and we train everyone, and then we’d say, but you can’t work here. Go work for our competitor. That’s what we’re doing as a country. People have talked about stapling. We should be stapling a visa to every high-tech diploma because those people, not only do they not take jobs from other Americans. They create jobs for other Americans.